Operas-in-concert have long been a popular—and far less expensive—alternative to fully staged presentations. Some audience members will miss opulent sets and costumes, but many appreciate the opportunity to concentrate on the music and not be distracted by “crazy” modern productions. Valued organizations like the Opera Orchestra of New York have ceased operations, while others, like Washington Concert Opera, continue to offer rarely-heard works and exciting rising stars.
Symphony orchestras also occasionally spice up their subscription series with concert operas. Recently, two programmed a pair of distantly related works for distinctly different reasons. Leon Botstein of the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) has long been an enthusiastic advocate of the lesser-known works of Richard Strauss, and this year he urgently sought to refute the low reputation of Guntram, the composer’s first opera, at Carnegie Hall.
To conclude its 2024-25 season, the Philadelphia Orchestra stayed on more familiar ground by programming Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as an out-of-town try-out for its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who next year will be leading a much-anticipated new Wagner production at the Metropolitan Opera. If Botstein’s valiant effort failed to persuade that Guntram is an unfairly neglected work, Nézet-Séguin’s exciting first Tristan considerably ramped up anticipation for next March’s Met premiere directed by debuting Yuval Sharon.
In 1998, Botstein presented Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena in concert at Avery Fisher Hall with Deborah Voigt and five years later repeated it there, a performance which was later released on CD, as was the ASO’s subsequent Die Liebe der Danae. More recently at Bard Summerscape, Bard led a staging of Die Schweigsame Frau, followed by Daphne at Carnegie Hall. Each revealed that these flawed but rewarding Strauss operas are worthy of attention; however, Guntram’s unconvincing libretto (by the composer) of forbidden love and renunciation in medieval times and its challenging, if workmanlike, score sorely tried one’s patience, even though the score lasts under two hours.
Unheard locally since Opera Orchestra of New York presented it in 1982, Guntram at least gave its audience the chance to hear John Matthew Myers, a splendid budding heldentenor who conquered the fiendish demands of the title role with tireless grace and pleasing fervor. It’s often said that Strauss hated tenors because he gave them such difficult music, but Myers took the hero’s lengthy monologues in stride with sweetly ringing tone and consistently earnest dramatic involvement.
On the other hand, as his unavailable love object, Freihild (the only operatic role Strauss wrote for his wife, Pauline de Ahna), soprano Angela Meade, Myers’s wife and veteran of many previous concert operas, seemed content to unenthusiastically point her lush voice at Strauss’s intermittently thrilling lines. Strenuous passages of despair or ecstasy sounded much the same as she rarely glanced up from her score.
Others in the cast, however, showed much more engagement, particularly Kevin Short in his best recent local outing as the Old Duke and Alexander Birch Elliott, implacably villainous as Freihild’s brutal husband. Sparkly tenor Rodell Rosel supplied much-needed camp energy as the Old Duke’s Fool. The lusty men of the Bard Festival Chorale made one wish their contributions were longer, and the ASO played with polished enthusiasm under Botstein’s sometimes too steady hand.
By the time Strauss composed Guntram, he was 30 and far from a beginner. His hit tone-poems Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung had already premiered, followed soon by Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche and Don Quixote. The opera’s orchestral writing is predictably richly inventive, but though he’d written many of his most beloved songs by then, Guntram’s vocal writing repeatedly aims for thrilling Wagnerian sweep but fails to soar.
Worse, the clunky libretto with its slavish Wagnerian echoes lumbers toward a limp finale. For example, Guntram sings an inappropriate song (Tannhäuser) for a Meistersinger-like assembly after falling inappropriately in love with the leader’s wife (very Tristan-esque). But, alas, there’s no final transfiguration pay-off.
As in most concert operas, Guntram’s singers lined up in front of the orchestra and performed from their scores on music stands; however, the Philadelphia Orchestra Tristan was boldly semi-staged by Dylan Evans on a raised makeshift platform erected behind the orchestra. The singers performed without scores, interacting with modest though apt blocking and no props. There was no goblet for the love potion nor sword to wound Tristan.
Nézet-Séguin’s cast was first-rate from top to bottom. Jonghyun Park’s youthfully plangent tenor opened the afternoon strongly as the Sailor, a role usually performed offstage. But Park was much more prominent singing from a spot in the second balcony of the newly rechristened Marian Anderson Hall. Freddie Ballentine, perhaps best known for his oily, seductive Sportin’ Life in the Met’s Porgy and Bess, proved a surprisingly chilling Melot.
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Scottish mezzo Karen Cargill impressed as an involved and immensely sympathetic Brangäne who, at moments, found the highest notes of her role a strain. Like many Brangänes, Cargill’s warning during the long love-duet didn’t float easily from her perch high in a third-tier box. Brian Mulligan embodied a vigorously incisive Kurwenal who nonetheless was occasionally covered by Nézet-Séguin’s magnificently surging orchestra. Bass Tareq Nazmi gave a nobly anguished account of Marke’s long monologue, which he spiced with flashes of impatient anger.
Whereas his future Met cast will feature newbies Lise Davidsen and Michael Spyres in the title roles, Nézet-Séguin chose experienced veterans Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton for his first stab at Tristan. Together, the pair premiered the Met’s previous production in 2016 and subsequently co-starred at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in Simon Stone’s controversial “subway” Tristan.
Despite bumpy moments in the hectic opening section of the Liebesnacht sequence (which was performed with its traditional cut), Skelton sang with admirable freshness and control; both he and Myers in Guntram eschewed the ugly “barking” that one so often encounters from tenors in Wagner and Strauss performances. Though not the most nuanced actor, he rose to the wrenching demands of Tristan’s harrowing third-act hallucinations with hair-raising intensity and penetrating, hall-filling high notes.
For twenty years, Stemme has been the latest Scandinavian Isolde dominating the operatic scene like Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson before her. That line may soon include Norwegian Davidsen, who returns from maternity leave in January for her first Isolde in Barcelona. Having performed her last staged Isolde in Palermo last year, Stemme announced that the Philadelphia Orchestra performances would be the final stop in her Isolde farewell world tour. At 62, she has given no signs that she plans to retire. On the contrary, she’s been adding new, lower character roles that are less demanding on her now receding top register.
She’s taken on with great success the Kostelnicka in Jenufa and plans to add another Janáček opera, The Makropoulos Case. She’s scheduled to move from Brünnhilde to Waltraute in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung as La Scala mounts its new Ring cycle. At her debut last fall as the Nurse in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, however, she appeared uncharacteristically uneasy with her wide-ranging music and failed to dominate her scenes as a good Nurse must.
Though she was electrifying as the furious act-one Isolde, her uneven valedictory appearance gave notice that it was most certainly time for her to move on. Her habit of leaning back to punch out high notes was more pronounced than ever, and nearly everything above the staff was only briefly attacked. Her dynamic range has contracted considerably, so there was little soft singing and most of the afternoon she ranged uneasily from f to fff. A slight but noticeable wobble warped long lines, so much so that her concluding Liebestod, even at Nézet-Séguin’s considerate tempo, was sadly prosaic, though she lightly brushed the final piano “Lust.”
2024-25 has been a particularly fine season for Nézet-Séguin’s German operatic projects. He led flamboyantly satisfying performances of Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome at the Met, and the intoxicating magic of Tristan was most sensitively conjured, neither too fast nor too loud—two accusations that are often fairly aimed at him. His “other” orchestra responded sumptuously with Philadelphia’s strings playing with especially ravishing richness.